A Mirror for Scholars

A MIRROR FOR SCHOLARS MILLAR MAcLuRE Doctus eras Graece felixque tibi fuit Alpha, at fuit infelix Omega, Cuffe, tuum. JOHN OWEN. THE history of the Elizabethan age is like an illuminated manuscript : each chapter begins with the bright capital of some great name-of one who sacked a Spanish town, or wrote a great poem, or founded a great house-and the whole is a collection of "successstories ," pendants to the glory of the Queen. Yet there were two professions in which few Elizabethans achieved success, learning and arms. Lances and letters combine in the ideal of the courtier, in Sidney, in Ophelia's remembrance of the untroubled Hamlet; but the England of Elizabeth offered small rewards to either the academic or the soldier. "The greatest Schole clarkes," said Sir Humphrey Gilbert, "are not alwayes the wisest men," and men of the world from Cecil to Osborn set down the same advice for their sons. Learn only what you can use, they said; the rest is lumber. Nicholas Carr in one generation and Robert Burton in the next complained bitterly of the small encouragement offered by English patrons and English presses to works of pure scholarship, leaving "many flourishing wits smothered in oblivion, dead and buried." As for arms, the Norrises and Vere achieved glory under incredible difficulties, but in general the "policy" of the Queen and Cecil made it impossible to make a military reputation in the Low Countries, while bogs and kerns conspired with incompetence to deny success in Ireland to all but Mountjoy. "Greatness will have the victory. Scholars and martialists (though learning and valour should have the pre-eminence yet) in England must die like dogs and be hanged." So Henry Cuffe,1 sometime ProlSourccs for the life of Cuffe are numerous but fragmentary. The following are by Cuffe, or attributed to him: (i) The D ifferences of The Ages of Mans Life: Together with the Originall Causes. Progresse. and End thereof (1607) [I have used the Harvard College Library copy, autographed "J. Donn"]; (ii) "Aphorismes gathered out of the liffe and end of that most noble Robert Earle of Essex in the liffetymc of Queene Eliza. not long before his death by his Secretary M Cuffe sometyrne fellow of Merton College in Oxon," Brit, Mus. MS. Harl. 1327~ fr. 58-60; (iii) "The Earl of Essex his buzze, made on his decayed estate by Mr. Henry Cuffe his secretary," Hist. MSS. Comm., 6th Report (IB77), 459a; (iv) a Greek epigram (signed "H. C.") in William Camden, Bn'tannia (1590). sig. A6v; (v) letters to Jean Hotman, in Francisci et Joannis H otomanorum patris ac filii ... epistolae .. . Amstelaedami .. . M.DCC. Cuffe's will is printed in Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in EnRland, cd. John Bruce, Camden Society, o.s. LXXVIII (1861). The apocryphaI[?] dying speech is in Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 1327, f. 55b. In addition to the DNB article and frequent allusions in the Calendars of State Papers and the Salisbury Papers: the following sources are essential: William Camden, The History of the Most 143 Vol. XXIII, no. 2, Jan., 1954 144 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY fesser of Greek in the University of Oxford, and secretary to Robert, second Earl of Essex, is reputed to have spoken on the scaffold. The speech is apocryphal but characteristic. "A man he was of exquisite learning," said Camden, who knew him well, "and of a ready and fluent wit, but turbulent and perverse.'" Students who have found in the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey the constant passion of a scholar's worldly ambition will see in Cuffe a Harvey who ventured into the world of affairs, and failed. He might be said to have listened to Harvey's complaint and advice: Common Leming, & ye name of A good schollar, was never so much contemn'd, & abjectid of princes, Pragmaticais, & common Gallants, as nowadayes; insomuch that it necessarily concernith, & importith ye lernid either praesently to hate yr -books; or actually to insinuate, & enforce themselves, by very special, & singular propertyes of emploiable, & necessary use, in all affaires, as well private, as puhlique, amounting to any commodity, ether oeconomical, or politique. Cuffe was a...